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The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically widened existing spheres of gender inequality, increasing disparities related to poverty, forced marriage, maternal mortality, gender-based violence, economic vulnerability, and illiteracy. For organizations aiming to rectify these areas of inequality, storytelling is a powerful tool for advocacy. This thesis investigates the intersection of storytelling and advocacy, focusing on the writing strategies utilized by leading gender-equality-oriented organizations. Utilizing Grounded Theory (GT) methodology, this thesis explores the emerging patterns and themes that arise in organizational storytelling strategies across differing contexts. An introduction chapter provides insights into the subject matter, highlighting existing knowledge gaps and rationalizing this study’s contribution to modern scholarship. A comprehensive literature review provides insights into contemporary gender inequality, advocacy, and storytelling, highlighting existing research relevant to this investigation. The methodology chapter outlines the implementation of GT, including research design, data collection, and coding, while the results chapter presents the key findings emerging from this study: a Storytelling Framework for Gender Equality. The discussion section offers both a narrative explanation and theoretical application of this framework and a discussion of research limitations and avenues for additional scholarship.

This study has explored teachers’ self-reported practices of teaching academic writing in Pakistani universities. The English language based developmental literacy courses in Pakistani undergraduate degrees are offered as part of the curricula rather than through specialized language centers. The three-course progression of developmental English literacy in Pakistani undergraduate curricula aims to develop academic writing proficiency besides effective business communication and technical report writing skills. This study has used generic qualitative research methodology (Caelli et al., 2003; Kahlke, 2014; Kostere & Kostere, 2021), snowball sampling for participant recruitment, and a combination of survey and one-to-one semi structured interviews for data collection. The research data were analyzed by using the socio-cognitive approach (Atkinson, 2002; Kecskes, 2020, 2023; Khatib & Shakouri, 2013) as a theoretical and analytical framework. Findings indicate that the instructors of academic writing strive to meet students’ learning expectations, involve learners in learning decisions, employ collaborative learning pedagogies, engage in collegiality, and peer mentoring, and keep a friendly outlook towards students for the latter’s academic interests. The instructors view formative assessment useful for learning, but they seek its implementation in a stress-free manner, and they want the focus of assessment to move from competition for grades to learning. The instructors ideally want to provide corrective feedback individually to each student, but because of the constraints of time, they can only give collective feedback, and delegate the task of feedback to students via peer-assessments. Many instructors do not use any assessment rubrics, but even those who do, cannot explain how their rubric is helpful in achieving the course learning outcomes. Finally, the study offers some policy recommendations, and suggestions for future research.

Almost Unimaginable is a story about friendship and interdependence that exemplifies a new theory, Imaginative Design, which builds off the theories of Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning by using a mixed media approach. In addition, it is informed by and exemplifies theories at the intersection of rhetoric and composition and disability studies. The dissertation is foregrounded by a theoretical chapter that introduces and traces the literature surrounding theories and themes from these disciplines, such as critical race theory, intersectionality theory, actor network theory, crip time, disabled person abuse, and disability and sex. Immediately following the theoretical chapter is the novel, Almost Unimaginable, which is a story that follows Kay, a middle aged woman who was in an accident 20 years prior that resulted in the deaths of her friends and a traumatic brain injury. The heart of the story lies in her friendship with Ben, a quadriplegic with muscular dystrophy and a top engineer with Raytheon. Together they eat out, smoke pot, drive backwards through drive-thrus, and engage in the antics of close friendship. In this mixed-media novel, using third person narrative, memoir excerpts, journal entries and newspaper columns, the reader witnesses Kay’s journey through joy and abuse, wonder and loneliness, life and death, and even psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The reader witnesses her life, which is almost unimaginable.

In his article “Translation as Creative Writing: Rewriting The Chinese Maze Murders in Contemporary China,” Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang examines four groups of selected writings centered on one of Robert van Gulik’s more well-known Judge Dee novels, The Chinese Maze Murders (written first in English but not published until 1956). Different from most publications on van Gulik and his novels, Zhang examines the impact of censorship and self-censorship on the writing, rewriting, and (re)adapting, “literal” and “liberal/free” translation of the Judge Dee stories traveling between Chinese and English, between China and the West, for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences. Focus is given to contextualizing the two Chinese versions and in particular Chen’s rendition. Zhang argues that the Chinese translator’s (self-)censorship plays a role in generating more creativity and agency, sometimes coerced, in literary translation across different cultures and languages and renders literary translation more a creative mission than merely retelling stories in a different language. Viewed in this light, translators are more like creative writers. What deserves more scholarly investigation is their agency and strategies in (re)creating the texts for their target audience in the target language.

In her article “All Men Are Brothers: Pearl S. Buck’s Translation of Shui Hu Zhuan and its Effects on Her Writing Career,” Zhihui Sophia Geng focuses on Pulitzer Prize winner and Noble Laureate Pearl Sydenstricker Buck’s All Men Are Brothers, her translation of the classical Chinese novel Shui Hu Zhuan. She examines the reception of her translation and analyzes the significance of All Men Are Brothers to Buck’s literary career. By providing the first complete translation of Shui Hu Zhuan to an English-speaking audience, Buck made a significant cultural contribution to the United States and English-speaking cultural spheres. The panoramic Shui Hu Zhuan showcases a drastically different way of writing from a long and dynamic Chinese literary tradition. Immersion in Shui Hu Zhuan nurtured Buck’s sympathy towards the common people and is instrumental in her choice to focus on the Chinese peasantry as the subject matter of her writing. This keen insight is indispensable to her creation of ground-breaking works such as The Good Earth. In addition, Buck’s reading of classical Chinese fiction had a considerable effect on her prose style. Buck proudly declared that the Chinese novel “has an illumination for the Western novel and for the Western novelist,” and her success as a novelist, in turn, affirms the worthiness of this tradition.

In her article “Exotic Construction of an Ancient Oriental Sappho: On Rexroth’s Creative Translation of Li Ch’ing-Chao’s Ci-Poems and its Influences,” Yuqun Fu discusses Li Ch’ing-Chao’s Ci-poems and her identity as a woman intellect in the patriarchal and feudal Song Dynasty of China. Due to Kenneth Rexroth’s feminist perspective and Sappho complex as well as his own pursuit to excel in the hipster stylistics of the newly prospering Beat writers, Rexroth turns to the Eastern women poets to fuel his own cause, especially in his idiosyncratic way of interpreting and translating Li Ch’ing-Chao. His translation focuses on gender identity and displays the manipulation of a mainstream culture to a nonmainstream culture. He misinterprets some frequent images and narrations in Li’s poems by singling out some love poems and supplementing some sexual implications and hence shapes the peculiar imagery of a heterogeneous ancient Chinese woman figure with the bold and unveiled expression of her own bodily desires and feminist emancipation with the mysterious veil of ancient Oriental mysticism. His translation of Li has profound influences on his own poetry in terms of themes and writing techniques. In addition, his version of Li has influenced some of his peers and subsequent translators, some Beat writers, and contemporary writers in the U.S.

In her article "Engaging China: Beckett’s Debt to Pound, Giles, and Laloy," Lidan Lin examines Ezra Pound’s influence on Samuel Beckett. In their dealings with China, Pound and Beckett are both indebted to such sinologists and cultural transmitters as Ernest Fenollosa, H. A. Giles, Louis Laloy, and Laurence Binyon who introduced Chinese culture, literature, and arts to the Western world through translation and their writings about China. Lin situates the Pound-Beckett connection in the broad cultural context of the early 20th century. She argues that while modernism’s turn to China as a cultural paradigm was collectively brought about by writers, museum curators, and publishers, Beckett’s appropriation of China was part of this paradigm. In mapping this paradigm, she traces it to the 18th- and 19th-century phenomena of Chinoiserie and suggest their cultural and aesthetic continuity.

There are two primary dates for Revelation that are generally accepted: the early or Neronic date (A.D. 64-68) and the late or Domitianic date (A.D. 95-96). In this dissertation, the early date of the book of Revelation is defended against the commonly accepted late date. The study engages with two major texts: Kenneth L. Gentry Jr.’s Before Jerusalem Fell, supporting the Neronic date, and Mark L. Hitchcock’s dissertation “A Defense of the Domitianic Date of the Book of Revelation,” defending the Domitianic date. This present study discusses the central arguments of both Gentry and Hitchcock as it defends the Neronic date across five chapters. In each chapter, arguments are presented by advocates representing contrasting viewpoints, with particular emphasis being placed on the perspectives of Gentry and Hitchcock. The dissertation offers a rationale supporting the choice of the Neronic date while rebutting the claims put forth by advocates of the Domitianic date. The study concludes that the Domitianic theory relies on external evidence and such evidence is not definitive. Conversely, the internal evidence, when examined in conjunction with the earliest available external source materials, compellingly suggests a date preceding the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70.

Ever since ProPublica published their groundbreaking analysis of Northpointe’s Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions Core Risk and Needs Assessment software (COMPAS) in 2016, this web-based decision support system (DSS) has spawned a wide range of critiques and charges of racial bias. COMPAS provides a full suite of decision support applications to the US prison-industrial complex, including algorithmically derived recidivism predictions that increasingly guide parole decisions. The larger conversation surrounding COMPAS raises the question of how we analyze powerful, and yet opaque, data assemblages. In this article, I model an allegorical analysis of data assemblages. I argue the skills of literary analysis can help us surmount the “trap” of analyzing black-box algorithms. Guided by Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” I analyze how COMPAS purloins our mediated ability to give an account of ourselves under the guise of objective, data-driven decision making.

This article offers a review of Mihaela Mihai’s book Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (2022). In it, Mihai courageously brings together insights from critical theory, political and legal science, philosophy, literary studies, and feminist theory to argue for the need of rearticulating how we remember complicity and resistance in the aftermath of political violence. Mihai develops her argument in three steps. First, she provides an account of how complicity and resistance are misremembered after systemic violence. Second, she tracks the political, epistemic and ethical consequences that this faulty work of memory-making holds for the present and future. And third, she proposes a strategy for challenging reductive narratives of the past and fostering more nuanced models of remembrance. The review analyses each of these steps with the aim of sketching out Mihai’s contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on complicity and implication in violence.

François Cheng (1929- ), elected to the Académie Française in 2002, structurally introduced the lexicological, syntactic, and semiotic form of Tang poetry to the French academia via his academic works. In the late 1980s, François Cheng shifted his focus from academic writing to creative writing, both in French, winning the 1998 Prix Femina for his novel Le Dit de Tianyi (1998) and Prix Roger Caillois for his collection of poems Double chant (2000). Focusing on his less-discussed poetry, which reveals higher congruity of his understanding of Chinese literary classics with creative representation, this paper argues that, as an analyst of Tang poetry, Cheng also acts as a contemporary translator of the classical Chinese aesthetic ideology into French modern verses. His subjective creation of poetry is both transcultural and trans-temporal, ambiguously corresponding to his lingual, racial, cultural, and national belonging, and appropriating a new valid form of French literary style. This ambiguity both transcends national identification and universalizes the international flow of knowledge. Beyond Feng Lan's (2017) recognition of François Cheng as a special representative of Chinese diasporic intellectuals who mediate between institutionalized French discourses and Chinese classical philosophy, a close reading of Cheng’s poems in the paper will support an investigation of his successive and transformative production of text.

Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of spiritual salvation and literary enlightenment for the beat generation and even the entire American literary community at large then and after, by means of his delicate transcreation of Han-shan images in line with American expectations at the time as well as by means of his skillful tradaptation of the realistic elements of self-expression, self-identification and self-actualization in Cold Mountain Poems and also by means of his profound exploration of the Chan Buddhism aesthetics and philosophical mediation in classical Chinese landscape poems and Chinese hermit culture

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of military slavery in the world. Then, he wrote an analysis of modern Islamic history In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (1983), which historicizes Islam as a politically failed force all over the world. These travelogues and history are generically different. But a common topological relationality can be mapped in the anecdotes of Naipaul’s travelogues and the historiography of Pipes’ history, as they use identical tropological configurations to historicize Islamic cultures. This similar tropological historiography, this article argues, is covertly an offshoot of the contemporary spatiotemporal context in which they were produced. The context was networked by certain ideological implications, ethnocentrism, and some cultural misapprehensions regarding Islamic/Muslim culture, making the historicism of both Naipaul and Pipes seem ahistorical.

Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in the 1950s, largely eclipsed in Lacan studies by interests in the ‘Late Lacan’ period of the Sinthome, the knots, jouissance and the semblant. Here I extend (and refine) arguments I began in Does the Internet Have An Unconscious, determining that algorithms in Lacanian theory help us understand the split subjectivity of internet discourse.

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable. This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together by technology and instead proposes that ‘community’ is best understood as a negative and inoperative phenomenon in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic feminism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community. Though the two understandings of community discussed here are ultimately different, they both emphasize a structuring absence, a void at the heart of social relations, leading to a rejection of the politics of communal essence and wholeness. Together, they articulate a critique of what I see as the main danger of platform capitalism's insistence on its specific vision of community: the foreclosure of a dimension of generative antagonism and of an opening for the unexpected, for ‘the political’ (le politique). While the dimension of ‘the political’ can never be fully foreclosed, the efforts of platform capitalism nonetheless alienate us from experiences of community understood as negative presence and thus as an ongoing work-in-progress and common responsibility.This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together by technology, and instead, proposes that ‘community’ is best understood as a negative and inoperative phenomenon in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic feminism and theories of ‘the political’ and ‘being-in-common’ from Jean-Luc N

Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only occur after we understand it at the nexus of where the group impinges on the individual. I revisit one of psychoanalytic theory’s primary gambits, interrogating the effect the social has on the individual psyche, to examine the fact of the social itself as a problem. Working from this premise, this essay has two ambitions: 1. To show that social media is always already a site to see the psyche as understood by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, meaning that social media is space for the psychoanalytic conception of the psyche prior to any intervention on behalf of psychoanalytic theory/ theorists; and 2. To show what we gain by reflecting that argument back on to psychoanalytic theory itself.

In late 2011, ex-Amazon developer Steve Yegge’s rant about his former company described Amazon’s rapid transformation from an online bookstore to a web-services entity with a ruthlessly unified platform, all guided by the idea that the company’s effort to streamline its internal efficiency could be monetized, and the resultant software products sold through Amazon Web Services. The media consumerism that fed Amazon’s early years funded a surveilling behemoth, one that everyone feared Microsoft would become. As such, AWS has become a manifestation of the internet’s Lacanian unconscious (even providing the services and hosting for Reddit), structured around the optimization of Amazon’s business model, built line by line with the labor of easily discarded programmers. In this article, we shall examine the subtle and far-reaching effects of Amazon Web Services platform on the Amazon storefront, “cloud services,” and social media, as well as the origins of AWS in theories of programming grounded in neural network theory and “artificial life,” as opposed to AI. In the end, AWS will be shown to be its own unique entity, a platform infinitely extensible, inexhaustible, and a monument to the circumlocutions of cybernetic capital.

The focus of discussion in this paper lies in a perception that orature of African written literature is not innocent but a form of control. Operated through its performance framework, the concept of orature provides an angle to observe how African oral tradition penetrates written literature and cultivates an awareness of the political nature both of the material to be written and of the writing process itself. This paper explores the performance framework in two African novels — Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Through such key concepts as event, narrative and self-reflexivity in performance theory, readers can perceive how the spatiotemporal dimension and audience-performer relationship are manipulated and how the four realms of African orature are reflected in these two novels and thereby help decipher their specific political connotations. Achebe and Adichie’s writing practices have indeed created a new purpose for orature in Nigerian literature.

Terada Torahiko is known as a scientific essayist in Japan, but hardly anyone knows he was a haikai poet as well as a physicist. According to him, haikai poetry and physics are two different ways of conceiving Nature, both valid and perhaps complementary to each other. Seeing his research in physics looking for regularities in apparently irregular phenomena in everyday life, we may say his haiku haikai spirit is manifest there and that he was pioneering a new science such as the one developed later by Ilya Prigogine. His association of haiku haikai poetry and Freudian interpretations of dreams leads us to rethink the relation between science and literature. This paper examines Terada's poetics as well as his research in physics in order to see how one can associate the Two Cultures separated from each other for such a long time.

In this paper, I analyze Henri Bergson’s insightful and contrasted vision of poetry. First, I show in what sense Bergson sympathizes with the idea that the poet must be credited to surpass the novelist in offering to us an unparalleled emotional apprehension of the world. Second, I nonetheless underline how Bergson grants the product of the poet, i.e., the poem itself, a problematic linguistic status, inasmuch as the focus of his analysis shifts from an intersubjective poetical apprehension of feelings to their individual poetic appreciation, or from the spiritual dimension of poetry to its material dimension. Third, I further suggest to reconduct both the poet’s inspiration and the poem’s intention to their living matrix within the creative dimension of the poïen, whose main hallmark might be found in Bergson’s concept of addition. As a whole, the article argues that Bergson’s approach of poetry helps one in clarifying the delicate distinction that he draws between three possible attitudes that humans take vis-à-vis reality: that is, the standpoint of philosophy, or more accurately of metaphysics; the standpoint of art, or rather of literature in the context of my paper; and the standpoint of science, in its inherent ambiguity. In addition, I unveil some stimulating paradoxes regarding Bergson’s conception of language, and discuss his fascinating hypothesis concerning the absolute object of art.

This thesis argues that literature is a valuable tool in examining issues of justice, and teaching ethics through literature is a way to build critical thinking skills and awareness of the world. In this thesis, I examine research and teaching methods that have already been studied and implemented in the teaching of ethics and justice in companionship with literature, and use these resources to propose my own syllabus for a community college class on Ethics in Reading. The syllabus is broken into 7 units: an overview of justice in literature, five specific justice issues (race, feminism, queer studies, eco-criticism, and poverty), and a final unit for the application of the concepts in a holistic way that reach beyond the class. There is a balance between how justice issues can be taught through literature, and how literature can be read in an ethical way. Everyone deserves access to a good education, and education of any kind holds inherent value. Narrative and stories are central to how we construct everything about ourselves that shapes how we influence and perceive the outside world, including our conception of justice. Teaching certain stories in certain ways allow for the teaching of justice, increased awareness of the world, and the creation of a self that wants to improve the world.

Many rhetoric and composition scholars concentrate on developments in argument and expression. Form, however, receives comparatively less attention, leading scholars to ask “Who Took the Form out of the Process?” and to argue for “Re-fusing Form in Genre Theory.” “Copia Rerum” responds to these invitations by reframing the history of rhetoric and composition as a history of rhetorical arrangement. Drawing on primary sources from several fields and attending to terms of art, I account for previously proposed theories of arrangement in composition studies, noting how arrangement is often conceptualized as a matter of intersentential or interparagraph linkages, organizational frames, or a series of moves; and as such, modern approaches to arrangement often reduce arrangement to a matter of argument or expression. Inasmuch as these scholars have found such inspiration from the history of rhetoric, and recognizing that many of these structural concepts are critiqued for their nineteenth-century assumptions and sometimes restricted focus on linear or static form, a turn to the history of rhetoric can enrich our understanding of arrangement. The following chapters turn to ancient rhetoricians from Greek and Roman rhetorics to Medieval and Renaissance rhetorics. Along the way, I attend to terms of art such as ideai, kephalaia, modi positionum, and figura rerum to explore the multidimensional, responsive, synthetic, distributive, variable, and transformational possibilities of rhetorical arrangement. I find that ancient Greek discourse theorists understand arrangement as integral to composition; that other Greeks and Romans recognize the responsive and embeddable potential of mesostructures; that Medieval rhetoricians extend these practices and blur distinctions between the parts of an oration, invention, and the figures of thought; and that the Erasmian tradition clearly combines the figures of thought with the parts of an oration to show how the parts of an oration can be

In her project, Elizabeth Catchmark traces the ways Black liberation organizers have positioned a guarantee of health as a prerequisite for citizenship since Emancipation. Their challenges to white supremacy named the violence of the state in making Black America sicker and organized communal acts of care to enable their survival in the wake of state neglect. By situating health justice as key to full participation in civic life, these activists refuted a disembodied interpretation of citizenship and offered instead an embodied, capacious vision of racial justice that acknowledges the entanglements of our environments, bodies, and minds. The genealogy Catchmark develops demonstrates that the right to health is a constituent feature of the Black political imagination across the long Black freedom struggle. Ultimately, she finds that Black liberation organizers, through their racial-justice informed theorizations of health and citizenship, illustrate that democracy and health are inextricable from the eradication of white supremacy while offering new ways forward for public policy, racial justice organizing, and interpersonal care.

“Modeling Wise Angers Online: Generation Z Activists and Their Digital Rhetorics of Feminist Rage” works at the nexus of feminist theory, digital media studies, and rhetoric to investigate how teen and young adult activists use 21st century social media technologies to challenge the sexist, racist, ageist, and ableist anger norms that disenfranchise young women in the public sphere. Each chapter theorizes what I call a “wise anger” strategy that its principal subject deploys to generate rhetorical agency for angry girl activists and change oppressive anger norms. The activists I examine are Greta Thunberg, Thandiwe Abdullah, and Shina Novalinga. While their causes range from the climate crisis to racial justice and Indigenous rights, and their primary platforms in my case studies are Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, respectively, they all make innovative, strategic use of digital affordances to reframe young women’s anger in public discourse. Examining datasets I compiled from the activists’ social media posts between 2018-2022, I use grounded theory and rhetorical analysis to identify patterns in the anger expressions in the multimodal, multilayered posts. I read the patterns through feminist and Black feminist theories of oppressive anger norms (Jaggar, Ahmed, Traister, Chemaly, Lorde, Cooper, Judd, Collins), cultural rhetorical frameworks (Powell et al.; Karetak, Tester, and Tagalik) and youth activist rhetorical frameworks (Applegarth, Hesford, Taft, Dingo). This dissertation is premised on the understanding that emotions have a biological basis, but are constructed socially, rhetorically, and culturally and thus tend to be scripted in ways that reproduce asymmetrical relations of power (Aristotle, Dixon, Fine, Gross, Harrington, Koerber). Ultimately, I develop a theory of wise anger as an angry response to injustice that is intelligent, informed, constructive, justice-oriented, hope-driven, rational, reasonable, and moral. The wise anger these youth activists mo

This is an autoethnographic case study about the value of storytelling through digital family narratives in composition studies and critical culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy. Using the Diné Educational Philosophy, Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’éh Hozhoo, and the four learning areas Nitsáhákees (Thinking), Nahat’á (Planning), Iiná (Living), and Siihasin (Reflection), as my conceptual framework, I create an assignment prompt for an all Diné composition classroom that asks students to collect family stories as a way to explore their cultural and academic identities, and to create digital family narratives to be housed on a website. I also complete the assignment myself and reflect on my choices in creating and completing the assignment, using Western academic scholarship and my own experiences as a Diné woman to validate my decisions in completing and creating the assignment. I argue for the centering of storytelling and cultural/personal identities/experiences in the composition classroom and pedagogical practice.

In utilizing cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) as postulated by Festinger (1957), this research sought to identify how European American (EA) superiors Paul Stafford and Vivian Mitchell were influenced by EA coworkers while interacting with African American (AA) subordinates Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan, respectively, within the film Hidden Figures. Based upon a thorough review of the literature on CDT and its relationships with racism and sexism, this research examined specific scenes in which the pair interacted individually and around coworkers before determining the impact of external interpersonal relationships upon the central biracial relationships. Conclusions demonstrated the key principle of dissonance resolution, as proposed by Festinger, in relation to multiracial working relationships.

Living a Participatory Life explores how people navigate demanding, digital times where social movements and digital media meet, in the context of what media scholars refer to as the participatory condition. The participatory condition describes how participation is an inherent, inescapable condition of digitality with its always-on and always-prompting media; it is distinctly different from the participatory cultures theorized of the blogosphere and Web 2.0. In the participatory condition, the digital is demanding, and our demands are digitized. What does it mean to live a participatory life in the participatory condition? How should we practice rhetoric (as a productive and critical art) during demanding, digital times? To aid in answering these questions, this dissertation offers a format theory of participation. I theorize four key concepts—parameters, imperatives, trans-situations, and sensibilities—to define participation as a formatted rhetorical practice that modulates affect and sensibilities within a formatted ecology. In the following three chapters, I locate three participatory sensibilities from advocates for social change across intersectional issues: Disparticipants, offering participatory dissent at the Women’s March; Fictocritics, generating criticism of the YouTube manosphere; and Installectuals, transforming Instagram during the Summer 2020 resurgence of Black Lives Matter activism. Each illustrates the ramifications of the participatory condition and how advocates for social change navigate it. The dissertation concludes with a provocation to learn from these sensibilities and begin reformatting our own participatory lives.